Install problems under Vista

Question

First I installed Captivate 3 trial on Vista. It worked fine,
I was using a non-Admin-account (but with granted admin rights).
When the trial expired I decided to buy the Technical Communication
Suite and the trouble began. I installed it and activated
FrameMaker successfully. FrameMaker, Acrobat and RoboHelp startup
successfully, but Captivate always comes up with "trial expired".
After several install/remove/install cycles I figured out
that I cannot get rid of the "trial expired" screen in Captivate
unless I use "Start as Administrator" from the Windows file
explorer context menu. When I login as (the one and only)
Administrator no problem arises. Now Captivate works also under the
regular account, but asks on every startup if I would allow to
start it with Administrator rights.
Even worse is that on right clicks (e.g. to the start icon)
Acrobat install starts and tries to configure something.
Could somebody please help me? I guess there should be just
some left-over files or registry entries which must be corrected.
I have a Production Suite CS3 installation on the same PC and
I'm not that happy with the recommendation of Adobe Tech Support
just to remove everything from my PC and install everything from
scratch. It's like telling me "go and get a new PC". This is a very
bad buyers experience, you buy something and feel
punished...

Answer 1

Hi there netsuxxess and welcome to our community
Sorry you are having issues. First off, note that I'm not an
Adobe employee. In fact, they rarely visit here. Occasionally they
will if we ask them to. Or they look in for a short period after a
new product release. But other than that, we are pure user-to-user
support.
The fact is, you have the Technical Communication Suite. This
is a package of four components (FrameMaker, RoboHelp, Captivate
and Acrobat Pro 3D) that have been designed to work together. So
you have special versions of each that are only available by
purchasing the suite. As you apparently downloaded the stand alone
trial of Captivate only, I'm guessing that is causing the issue
with the operation of it as opposed to other suite components.
I know it probably won't sit well with you, but you should
probably try Adobe's suggestion of uninstalling to start over.
However, I'm not sure I'd suggest uninstalling everything. I'd
probably try the following approach.
Uninstall the TCS.
Install the Captivate 3 trial, then uninstall it. (It wasn't
clear if you performed an uninstall of the Captivate 3 trial prior
to installing the TCS. As the TCS and the stand alone verison are
different, I'm thinking that if you simply installed the TCS
without first uninstalling the trial, this could be what caused the
issue. So I'm suggesting a special uninstall of the trial only in
the hopes that it will help cure the issue)
Reinstall the TCS and hopefully things will be better.
If that fails to work, you are probably in for a call to
support to help unravel and correct the issue.
I know it's a pain, but Adobe is huge with a vast array of
products. Many products (such as Captivate) were acquired from
other companies. So I'm sure that Adobe is still today working to
make them coexist more seamlessly. You have many different
departments involved. For example, even with simple stand alone
Captivate, another department handles the installation bits. So
it's quite possible that some routine with installation isn't all
that familiar to even the staff handling the actual product
development.
Hopefully something here was helpful... Rick